


5 Transfers Darcy Made on the London Underground (And One She Missed, Thank Thor)

by Kurukami



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom, Thor (Movies)
Genre: 5 Things, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Darcy & Her Taser, F/M, Gen, fray-adjacent, some of the time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1660037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Darcy’s defense, she feels that she catches a lot more things than people give her credit for.</p><p>(Or:  Just what it says on the box.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chicken Little

There are times, Darcy knows, when she’s been accused of not paying attention. Of overlooking vital clues, or of rambling off on random tangents. Like the iPod thing. Wow, does Jane ever love to point _that_ one out.

However:

In Darcy’s defense, she feels that she catches a lot more things than people give her credit for. For example, who was it who spotted the glimmering aurora of the opening Bifrost when Thor fell to earth? Who caught sight of the man-shaped silhouette in the rainbow-hued photographs, after they’d hit him with the van and (justifiably, Darcy will always maintain, even though she now loves Thor like a brother) tasered him? And who was it who tracked down the possibility of their newly-arrived totally ripped homeless dude actually _being_ , in fact, who he turned out to be?

Yup. That was totally her. (Although yes, Selvig gave her the idea for the last bit, but hey, he was dismissive about it. That counts, right?)

So when she spots the sorta skeevy looking policeman making his way down the center of the Tube a bit too smoothly, her internal alarms go off. When she sees the weathered-looking guy in the tailored suit that follows in his wake shortly thereafter – the one who reminds her of no-one so much as Agent Coulson, except greyer around the edges and, duh, British – and more importantly, catches sight of the secret-service-esque radio in his ear and the compact pistol holstered neatly under his jacket, well, _boom_ , obvious conclusion.

Something serious is going to go down, and soon.

She pulls out her phone and dials as soon as she hits the next station. “Jane?”

“…bwuh?”

“Jane, wake up. This is important.”

“…whazhit. D’rsee?”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Wow. Yes. It’s me.” 

“—time is it?”

Darcy looks. “Ten fifteen. How are you not awake yet?” She frowns, ignores it. “Listen, I know you and Thor were up until all hours last night, but there’s something you need to know. Don’t take the Tube today.”

“—what? Why not?” She can practically _hear_ Jane gaining focus on the far end of the line, which, given that Darcy’s pretty sure Jane hasn’t had her coffee yet, is actually kinda impressive. Still.

“Let’s just say I spotted something of the Agent Jackboots variety and I’m reasonably certain bad things are about to start happening.”

“Darcy,” Jane says. “I love you, you know that, but in all seriousness I’m pretty sure you’re imagining things and it’s way too early in the morning—”

Right about then is when she hears the subway wall blow in about a hundred yards down the line. There’s a horrific squeal of train-wheels trying to brake much more suddenly than they expected and then a _whole fucking chain of subway cars_ that had been attempting to decelerate into the station goes off the rails and through the smoking hole in the wall. In the crashing and the collapsing and the screaming and the helping people out of the wreckage that follows, Darcy hangs up completely by accident, and later saying “I told you so” really doesn’t seem as important anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by these two screencaps from "Skyfall".
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://tinypic.com?ref=k55p2r)  
> [](http://tinypic.com?ref=8yf9tf)  
> 


	2. Wibbly Wobbly

Of all the possible ways to start a day, Darcy figures waking up in an twilit alley, head pounding and body feeling distinctly rebellious, is probably – OK, strike that, _definitely_ \-- on the really not good end of the scale. She sits up, takes stock of herself –

– _oh God,_ as her stomach does a slow roll sideways and she swallows hard – 

– glasses in place on her nose, _yaaay, vision,_ her clothes all still in place and no part of her body is feeling molested, _oh thank you God,_ her cotton-canvas messenger bag’s over her shoulder and doesn’t look to have been torn open, _so I probably didn’t get mugged,_ and though her head’s spinning like she had _waaay_ too many shots last night the juxtadimensional sensor is still in her hand so – 

Wait.

_What. The. Hell?_

She looks down at the Jane-gadget in her hand, then up and down the alley, taking in the cobblestones and the old brickwork and the bruised-looking sky overhead, before she queasily levers herself to her feet. Her head’s still spinning and her steps are wobbly, but the feeling of malaise is starting to recede a little under the impressions of wherever the hell she is. There’s a multilayered stink in the air that her nose is doing its best to untangle, like equal parts blood and smoke and sewage and horse shit and burned-out electrical fuses and way too many bodies close together and _oh my God_ what is that crap on her knee? She pulls the cuff of her jacket down and brushes at it, which doesn’t help anywhere near as much as she hoped it would, but, well, sort of.

“All right. I’m OK. As long as I’m still in London. Please tell me I’m still in London.” _And now you’re talking to yourself, Darcy._ She gives herself a mental shake and straightens up.

OK. She can absolutely do this. She’s been through god-falls and the Destroyer taking out most of Puente Antiguo and the Chitauri attacking New York and even that _really unpleasant_ winter when it dropped like four feet of snow in thirty-six hours. She can totally handle whatever’s outside this cul-de-sac. She takes a deep breath, walks down to the open end of the alley, looks out, and gapes at the Victorian-era architecture and the halfway-finished bascule-and-suspension bridge being built across what is obviously, even now, the Thames.

“…Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

In her hand, the juxtadimensional sensor emits a happy-sounding _ding!_

* * *

Darcy will be the first to admit she’s not exactly inconspicuous. She knows that she’s got features that, minus the hipster glasses, Botticelli would’ve loved to paint (thank you, History of Renaissance Art 301), and she knows that her combination of raven hair and smokin’ blue eyes is absolutely striking, plus there’s the fact that, hey, _boobs._

That said, she’s betting she’s never drawn as many conspicuous stares as she does making her way down what she’s pretty sure is Lower Thames Street away from the Tower of London and towards what she really _really_ hopes is going to be the Monument Tube Station. Jane’s gadget continues to chirp happily at her as she hurries down the crowded sidewalk, and between that and her glasses and the messenger bag and the blue jeans she’s wearing she is more than willing to bet she’s inspiring the Victorian-era equivalent of urban legends at this very moment.

 _OK, so – what happened? How did I get here, and where – possibly more importantly,_ when – _exactly is “here” anyways?_

This sort of problem practically never occurs in time-travelling books or the science fiction she’s seen – though, really, she’s taking new stock in the genre after the events of the past couple of years. Inevitably, the erstwhile protagonists in those little bits of entertainment stumble across convenient newspapers stating the precise date, or are fortunate enough to overhear conversations like “Goodness, what a magnificent Guy Fawkes’ Day of 1893 this was!”, or just happen to witness major historical events which _of course_ they’re familiar with.

Luckily, that’s where Darcy has a bit of an advantage.

She knows more than a few people look at a political science degree and make a face. The thing about political science is, though, that it’s more than just knowing how to talk to people and influence public opinion. Naturally those are important, but in Darcy’s opinion – and her thesis advisor backed her up, so nyaaah – it is just as important to understand _how_ a society arrived at a particular place. To do that, one needs to know and understand not only the course of historical events but be able to track the currents, movements and motivators that brought about major changes as well. Darcy took a double handful of various history classes en route to finishing her poli-sci degree – which, admittedly, she could have done more expeditiously, but what the hell, it’s the journey not the destination, right? – and none had drawn her in more than Victorian-era England.

That’s a big part of why she ended up in London after finishing her internship in New Mexico with Jane. The fact that she and Jane stayed friends, and that Jane had relocated here chasing what she called spatial anomalies, and OK, that during a gap in between significant projects of her own Darcy had decided it’d be fun and hopefully payworthy to get back into the whole “ _for Science!_ (as paid for by generous SHIELD grants)” thing and assisting Jane is beside the point.

(Though admittedly, she’s reconsidering the wisdom of the latter at this moment.)

All of which goes to say: the fact that what she’s confident is going to be the Tower Bridge is only partially constructed puts her somewhen between 1886 and 1894. Judging by how completed it looks, she’s guessing about halfway in between. And _that_ tells her that the station at Monument, which from what she knows was completed by 1884 and has been from the start a part of the Circle Line, _should_ be open for business. Tower Hill would've been the only other nearby option, but she _thinks_ that one closed down in 1884 and didn't reopen until 1967.

She’s been in London long enough to know the layout of the Circle Line, and the geography of the streets above it, like the back of her hand. And the sensor she’s carrying says, she’s reasonably sure, that whatever it is it’s picking up is over in the vicinity of Notting Hill Gate Station – the better part of six miles west.

(She is so totally suggesting that SHIELD start up a course on “how to best ascertain your time-space coordinates” when she gets back. Assuming she gets back. Because there’s no way she’s the first person something like this has happened to.)

So. She focuses on putting a “don’t even think of screwing with me” expression on her face, and keeps one hand on Jane’s gadget and the other wrapped firmly around the collapsible baton tucked away inside her messenger bag. The taser’s all well and good, but she’d rather not cause some anachronistic paradox that lets Hitler win World War 2 if she can help it. Butterflies and hurricanes and all that.

* * *

Darcy hides the juxtadimensional sensor inside her messenger bag before she gets to Tower Hill Station, figuring that Victorian-era Brits giving her stink-eye because she’s keeping a canary in her handbag is liable to cause less disruption than carrying something that H.G. Wells might’ve dreamed up in an opiate haze. She also manages to pawn the necklace she’d been lucky enough to be wearing before – well, before _whatever_ happened. She figures it’s gonna be enough of a challenge to navigate the early Underground without having to dodge transit cops, or whatever the current equivalent might be, because she couldn’t pay for the cost of a ticket with time-appropriate currency. On the other hand, Darcy’s pretty sure the pawn shop owner totally short-changed her as to the value of the necklace regardless of her batting her eyes and acting flirtatious.

Win some, lose some. She had liked that necklace, but she likes the thought of fresh-roasted coffee, reruns of EastEnders, fresh music on her iPod, and avoiding the influenza pandemic that sickened half of London in 1890 much more.

As the train rattles noisily westward along the Circle Line – and wow, there’s a huge difference between knowing theoretically that the Tube trains were steam-powered in the early days before widespread electrification in the early 20th century, and the reality of smoky, dingy stations and railway carriages – Darcy has time to reflect, think, and try to remember. Her immediate memories are a jumble of thoughts and sensations. The last thing she clearly remembers was … last night, she’s pretty sure?

Jane had called her up, tremendously excited about something and talking technobabble a mile a minute, Darcy recalls. She’d walked in to the lab that morning with fresh coffee in hand and Jane had been there already, hair pulled tidily back and shadows under her eyes like she hadn’t been persuaded to sleep yet. Jane had handed her the sensor and asked her to stand over to one side of some sizeable apparatus, behind a barrier, while she calibrated the whatever-it-was to – 

– to –

Darcy has a kaleidoscope of images in her head, of a flash of incandescence as a beam licked out from the apparatus towards the target, something she half-remembered Jane saying she’d salvaged from New York after the Chitauri attack, and then –

– _aw, shit._

Then the world had turned upside down, and there was a moment, a minute, a lifetime’s worth of sensations jumbled all together, and then… blackness.

And the feeling of cold alley cobblestones underneath her.

“Jane Foster, we are _so_ having words about safety procedures when I get back,” Darcy mutters.

“I beg your pardon?” says the woman in the period-appropriate dress seated across the aisle.

“Oh! Uh. Nothing. Sorry to have disturbed you,” Darcy stammers out, and then spends the rest of the ride with her messenger bag in her lap trying her darnedest to be invisible.

The chirpy _dings!_ emerging from her bag on a semi-regular basis do _not_ help with that.

* * *

By the time she climbs the stairs at Notting Hill Gate Station, Darcy’s fairly confident she’s got a handle on what to do. Find the anomaly, figure out what exactly is going on, and if she’s lucky, she can just step right back through to London, 2014.

That thought sustains her for about a block. Hot baths and ice cream and cherries jubilee, a DVR’d episode of EastEnders to watch and her own bed to snuggle into and a hot shower to wash off the taint of smoke on her skin. But then –

– what if getting home is nowhere near that easy?

All that she can do is hope, right?

Right.

Darcy steels herself for whatever might come and follows where the sensor is telling her, tracing her way down streets and through back alleys. She keeps one eye on her surroundings and the other looking out for whatever form this dimensional anomaly might take, because really, who knew? It could be a heat shimmer hanging in midair, a pool of black water puddled in the cobblestones where no puddle should be, the sound of a blackbird serenading where there were no birds nearby, or something as nearly beyond her comprehension as —

She turns a corner, the sensor in her hand starts chirping happily away, and she stops dead.

“What.”

There’s what looks to be a perfectly ordinary largish blue police phonebox nestled against the alley wall, and if the juxtadimensional sensor is not _completely lying_ to her that’s what it’s picking up.

_You have got to be kidding me._

She stalks slowly towards it, Jane’s gadget held out like some kind of magic wand, circling around to see if the signal is consistent or whether it’s just something _beyond_ the police box, but nope, that’s what the sensor is claiming it found.

She pokes the blue box gingerly, then lays a hand flat against its surface. Wood. Metal. Frosted glass windowpanes. A sign saying “Police Telephone Free for Use of Public.” She yanks on the doorhandle hopefully.

Locked, of course.

 _Great. So. Guess I’ll be stuck here a lot longer than I thought._ She puts her back against the door of the phonebox and lets her knees collapse, sliding slowly down into a crouch, then puts her head against her knees and tries very hard not to let the tears out.

The sound of rapidly approaching footsteps and frantic shouting brings her out of her reverie.

“—no, I told you, the sonic’s not even slowing it down! Come on, _run_!”

A couple of people come tearing around the corner and sprint in her direction, and Darcy blinks away her tears and grabs for her messenger bag. “Listen, I don’t know who you are but _oh my holy fucking Thor—_ ”

Something tenebrous and tentacular comes glomming around the corner behind the pair, something iridescent and black and slimy all at the same time, with a dozen or more eyes floating in the miasma. Darcy doesn’t even think, she just pulls her taser and shoots right between them, tagging the protoplasmic _thing_ square on. It lets out a horrific, shrieking cacophony, like dozens of teakettles being tormented in some maniacal orchestra, and—

—well, there’s really no more appropriate word than “explodes”.

Gobbets of black sludge end up spattering most of the far end of the alley, though a few nearly make it to Darcy’s shoes. She shudders, feeling her face twist into an expression that can’t possibly resemble happiness, and looks up at the pair. “What. The. Fu—”

“Minor shoggothim, major public safety hazard,” manages the tall man in the bowtie, then takes a closer look at her and grins hugely. “Good heavens, Darcy Lewis, as I live and breathe!” 

“—uh. What?”

“My goodness, how have you been? I must admit, I never expected to see… you… here…” He stops, then peers at her more closely. The redheaded woman behind him has one hand braced against a wall, still trying to catch her breath.

“Um, sorry to burst your bubble, guy, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never met. How the hell do you know my name?”

“Ahhh, spoilers. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. Still! An absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I thank you for the extremely timely rescue. I think I’ve never seen a shoggothim dispatched with quite so much aplomb. Have to remember that tactic, next time—”

“Look,” Darcy cuts in, because she’s been around Jane long enough to know that if you don’t interrupt the scientific genius types before they get on a roll you’ll never get a word in edgewise. “This is going to sound like a really weird question, but who exactly are you?”

His grin returns. “I’m the Doctor. And _that_ is my travelling companion, Amy Pond.”

Darcy manages a smile and a feeble wave, which Amy returns with a bit more enthusiasm and a “hey, how’re you doing” that Darcy immediately tags as Scottish.

“Darcy Lewis,” she replies. “But from the sound of it, you already knew that.” The Doctor – _really? who calls themselves that?_ – somehow manages to look impish and spectacularly confident at the same time, and _wow_ , if you could bottle that look you might well have the most successful aphrodisiac in the history of mankind. Darcy fights back a blush and continues. “I know this might sound odd, but I kind of got stuck here through no fault of my own and, well, do you know if there’s some kind of juxtadimensional anomaly nearby?”

“Oh, I think I might,” the Doctor replies, and pushes open the door to the police box. A glimmering, halcyon light illuminates the alleyway, and Darcy peers inside out of sheer curiosity. “Can I offer you a lift home?”

Darcy gives both him and Amy a long look, taking in the gleam in the Doctor’s eyes, the manic grin on his face, and the slightly more comforting expression on Amy’s, and steps inside.


	3. Elementary, My Ass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What could possibly go wrong?
> 
> Really, Darcy should know by now not to ask questions like that. Even nonverbally. Because fate positively _loves_ to fuck with her expectations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started faffing around with the idea for this chapter, I had in mind a quick drabble-y bit of exposition. Two, maybe three thousand words at most. Of course, then it started growing plot, and characterization, and in the middle of all that there was a kitchen remodel (with its own multivarious wrinkles and headaches) and somehow I ended up here, two months and over ten thousand words of prose later.
> 
> So. Uh. Enjoy? :)

**i.**

Of _course_ Darcy’s heard of Sherlock Holmes. If someone ever asked her she’d say _sure, c’mon, really, who hasn’t?_ He was the media’s latest celebrity sensation for more than a little while after coming into the public eye, with his police consultations and his eccentric deductive brilliance and that ridiculously over-memed YouTube clip of him with the deerstalker hat.

And with the supposed scandal that followed, well… 

She knows, from the degrees she’s earned and from lots of first-hand observation – remember that frenetic swirl of curiosity, speculation, and attempted scapegoating that followed the Battle of New York? – that there’s nothing the media loves so much as the scent of fresh scandal. If it involves sex or blood, or both, all the better. The way the British media, particularly that gleefully malicious _Sun_ reporter Kitty Riley, turned on Sherlock Holmes was nasty enough that Darcy almost wishes she’d been in London back then. Holmes probably could’ve used a good person in public relations around to stave off all the insanity – someone with a freshly earned degree in political science, maybe.

But she was in Puente Antiguo, helping keep Jane functional while Jane was pulling twenty-plus-hour days trying to puzzle out the secrets of pan-dimensional travel, and at the same time trying to polish off the last classes of her own poli-sci and comp-sci degrees through distance-learning courses. Erik had already been not-quite-forcibly-conscripted by Agent Jackboots, and by the time Jane got unexpectedly recruited to a purportedly-vital project in Tromsø, Darcy was heading home to Queens for a long-overdue visit to her family and Sherlock Holmes had been out of the picture for a while. It isn’t something she thinks she regrets, in retrospect, not really. Jane’s become like a sister to her – her own eccentric, brilliant, mad-girl-genius sister – and Darcy doesn’t really wish she’d been somewhere else during any of the rest of that exciting year. 

Still.

That qualm lingers inside of Darcy for a while after Sherlock Holmes’s suicide. A part of her wonders, _What if it had been Jane up there on that hospital roof? Could I have done anything to prevent it?_ She doesn’t even know what, really; maybe just opening some hypothetical door to provide a way out that didn’t involve… that.

Truth is, though, thoughts like that one have almost faded into the back of her mind by the time the secret-agent-man-in-pursuit Tube bombing happens.

So there she is in the aftermath of _that_ , getting the minor laceration high up on her forehead stitched by one of the doctors that rushed to the scene. The doctor’s some guy with tousled blond hair and an intent expression. He looks strangely familiar to Darcy, but she’s wincing a bit and swearing under her breath and she’s got her glasses clutched in one hand, so it takes her a minute or so before she realizes.

“Holy crap, you’re John Watson,” Darcy blurts before she can help herself.

The doctor blinks, then narrows his eyes at her as he finishes the suture. “I’m not going to ask how you know my name, because I’d guess that’s fairly obvious.”

“Sorry,” she says, more quietly. “I don’t mean to be rude. You must get more attention than you’d like.”

“Not as much as there used to be, thankfully.” Watson ties off the stitching and carefully snips the thread. He gently swabs the site with disinfectant, then applies a gauze pad and a modest amount of surgical tape. “The first two or three months were hell. You’re American, yeah?”

“Well, yeah,” Darcy says, then winces again as she tries to waggle her eyebrows. She puts her glasses back on, carefully – he’s a little fuzzy this close up, without them – and offers a hand. “Darcy Lewis.”

Watson looks down at his gloved hands, then pointedly peels the bloodied latex off before taking her hand in his and offering an amiable smile. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lewis, even under circumstances like these. Time was I’d probably ask you out for a pint, but, well…”

She follows his meaningful glance at the chaos around them, then meets his blue eyes and tilts her head consideringly. She’s alive, more or less unhurt, single nowadays since who knows what the hell is up with Ian – seriously, _boys_ – and John Watson has a comforting solidity to him, a sense of dependability and quiet confidence in the middle of things gone absolutely mad. That, plus the way he dropped his head to look down at his hands, then back up at her from under his brows makes her think, _hmm, well now..._ She lets the edges of her mouth curl up in a hint of a smile and says, “Oh, I’m sure there’s bound to be more opportune moments in the futu—”

Darcy breaks off suddenly, staring down the passage that’s turned into an impromptu triage site. At the other end of the hall, just before the turn, there’s a tall man with ginger hair wearing a dark grey coat and a scarf. The man’s staring down towards them with a worried expression on his face, which wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary except—

Darcy blinks a few times, shakes her head, then looks again. The man’s vanished.

“What?” Watson asks, twisting to look down the white-tiled passageway, then back towards her. “What is it?”

“Uh,” she manages. “Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Just saw someone I thought I knew.”

Except she could have sworn that the man she saw was Sherlock Holmes.

 

**ii.**

She calls Jane to reassure her that she’s okay, then skips going in to the lab and takes what’s left of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon off to binge on things she’s sure she’d otherwise forego. A handful of hours later, Darcy finds herself sitting on a bench near Festival Pier, with takeout from Wagamama and a shopping bag filled with chocolate, expensive coffee beans, and a pair of shoes she’s been eyeing covetously for weeks. 

The midafternoon sun is glimmering off the Thames, but the late autumn wind is making the day chilly and there are clouds blowing in from the southwest. She savors a cup of chilli chicken ramen, letting it warm her up while she compulsively hits refresh on her smartphone to see if _The Guardian_ ’s got anything new about this morning’s events. Apparently that hadn’t been the only thing that went off the rails, no pun intended; shortly after the Embankment bombing, a trio of unidentified gunmen had shot their way into a board of inquiry in a government building in Parliament Square and killed or wounded a dozen people or more. Two of the attackers were dead while the third had escaped, and the authorities (who declined to comment on the attackers’ identities or motivations at the present time, which _of course_ had the media in a frenzy of wild speculation) were searching for that man and any additional accomplices even now.

Darcy’s thoughts keep circling back to what she had been a witness to. The subway explosion, yes, naturally, but… obviously there must be something else going on here, right? Something that she really hopes isn’t connected, even though part of her wants to suspect it is.

At the end of the morning she’d ended up with John Watson’s phone number and a lot more questions running around inside her head than she had started the day with. She could swear that she read something online, a few years back, that Sherlock Holmes was involved with – an investigation into several of what were initially reported as gas explosions but that the police eventually termed terrorist bombings. The rumors she remembers suggested Sherlock Holmes had, if she remembers right, had something to do with stopping that bomber. Which meant that maybe, possibly, _perhaps_ witnessing what she thought could have been Sherlock this morning might mean… 

Might mean…

_Could there have been any connection between those explosions and this morning’s?_

She thinks about it for all of ten seconds, nibbling on her lip, but… no. No way. Darcy knows she’ll need to flex her Google-fu, maybe even write herself a set of data-harvesting scripts to go digging through LexisNexis and the archives of however many London newspapers might have digitally-stored archives to be sure, but she’s pretty sure _those_ bombings were all together around two years back, and that they _had_ all looked like gas explosions at first. This morning’s catastrophe had looked like anything but. Connecting multiple bombings several years apart with what looked like a completely different M.O. this morning didn’t make much sense. After all, the British authorities must still have that first bomber in custody, right?

Right. So.

That meant that whatever it was that happened today, it most likely had absolutely nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes. Which made the next question:

_Does John Watson suspect, or even think, that Sherlock Holmes might be alive?_

No. Well, _probably_ no. If that actually was Sherlock – which is an awfully large _if,_ she admits to herself, even though it really really did look like him – then the way he pulled a disappearing act before John could turn around sure suggests he wants John to keep thinking he’s dead.

_But even assuming that Sherlock Holmes is alive, why the hell would he fake his own death and then conceal that fact from John Watson, the man who had for several years’ time been his… well, there really is no more appropriate word than “sidekick”, is there?_

_Partner in crime?_

_Companion?_

Well, no, probably not that last; it brought up entirely different connotations, after all, on a multitude of levels.

Darcy takes her time finishing the remainder of the noodles, turning the question over and over in her head. The sun trails steadily westward, painting the London Eye in shades of amber and honey. What there is of the day’s heat starts to fade away, and no matter which way she turns the problem in her head she’s pretty sure she can’t begin to come up with any answer that comes close to making sense.

Out of idle curiosity, she Googles for “sherlock holmes death conspiracy” on her smartphone. Google throws back around 157,000 hits, a lot of which seem to be individual posts on various forums and bulletin boards that can best be summed up as “OMG why?!?”, with most of the rest alleging convoluted theories that run the spectrum from adequately plausible to batshit insane.

She scans them: governmental cover-up, governmental cover-up, alien intervention, paranormal justification, mass hypnosis, plasticine duplicate, governmental cover-up – all that and more. There’s posts that allege use of bungee cords, posts that claim to have witnessed a small battalion of conspirators with a portable high-fall airbag, posts that fail physics forever by stating that Sherlock’s billowing long coat slowed his descent enough to allow him to survive, like he’s the goddamned Batman or something. There’s a series of posts that claim Sherlock’s an immortal with a regenerative “healing factor”, whatever the hell _that_ is, that he was born sometime in the 19th century, and that he was the cause of every enigmatic disappearance from Jack the Ripper to Amelia Earhart. There’s even one which, via an absolute _wall_ of text and some breathtakingly convoluted reasoning, claims that Sherlock’s apparent “death” was the end result of decades-long plotting by some obscure WW2-era Nazi splinter organization called HYDRA. 

Seriously, Darcy thinks, she couldn’t _make_ this shit up.

A vocal minority of the results link to real-person-slashfic on a variety of fansites and… ugh, really?

“Vampire Sherlock Holmes/John Watson fanfic titled ‘My Immortal’, oh my Thor, _why?_ ” she mutters. Darcy can feel her face twist into what she’s sure must be an unflatteringly sour expression. _Not that I don’t appreciate the thought of two very pretty men together, but seriously, people, have some respect for the dead._ She thinks about that for a second, then amends that thought to: _Presumably dead._

Plus, well, there was just no way in hell John Watson’s gay. Not judging from his reactions during their conversation this morning, anyways.

Bisexual, _maybe._

She rolls her eyes and tries to put that thought out of her head. She takes one more quick peek at the search results, then eyes the sinking November sun and heads for Belvedere Road. Her head is aching, her feet are sore, and at this point a taxi back to the flat she shares with Jane has to be a better option than trying to navigate the mass-transit snarl that this morning’s events must still be causing.

But the question of how – _if_ – Sherlock Holmes faked his own death, and why, continues to tug at her all the rest of the week.

 

**iii.**

“Jane, why would you throw yourself off the top of a tall building?” Darcy asks on Monday, because she’s been thinking about goddamned Sherlock Holmes all weekend and the present experiment’s going nowhere and, well, she’s kind of bored.

Jane splutters and chokes on the mouthful of coffee she just brought to her mouth, but somehow manages _not_ to get hot caffeinated beverage all over her monitor and keyboard, which Darcy figures has to be some kind of miracle. That, or Jane is way better at swallowing unexpected spurts of hot liquid than Darcy ever would’ve thought and _oh dear God that mental image went wrong so fast,_ so Darcy, blushing, grabs Jane a paper towel and tries very hard not to think about Thor or Jane or John Watson in any kind of naked context. By the time Jane’s breathing normally again Darcy’s halfway hoping that her question will have been forgotten in the turmoil, but for the moment Jane isn’t Distracted By Science or by Thor who, let’s face it, is pretty distracting, and so she actually replies while Darcy’s still wondering _wait, how did naked John Watson just stealth his way into my thoughts?_.

“Why would I possibly want to throw myself off a building?” Jane’s got a perplexed look on her face, like she might be thinking _who is this morbid woman in my lab and what has she done with my friendly intern Darcy?_

“Well, not _you_ you, obviously, I mean, y’know, generic you. Third person you. Someone else you, not actual you.”

“Um.” Jane purses her lips, thoughtful. “Is there any correlation or causation I should take into account?”

“Public scandal. Or, well, the suggestion of some really nasty public scandal, even if it’s obviously got to be totally false.”

Jane gets that focused look she gets when she’s turning over long complicated equations and hypotheses in her head. “What kind of scandal?”

“Professional. As in, large groups of people questioning the validity of your work, claiming that any tangible results were faked and that you’d directly put innocent people in danger.”

“That’s it?” Jane frowns. “That doesn’t seem like something worth killing myself over. What other circumstances are there? Is generic third-person me intelligent at all?”

“Yes, definitely. Possibly even smarter than you you.”

“Then that makes no sense whatsoever. Lacking some other pressure on me, I can’t see how I would possibly be motivated or despondent enough for suicide.” Jane shakes her head. “I mean, I’ve been there, in that head-space where no-one believed my theories, but _I_ knew I was right and I had evidence; that’s what was most important to me. Other people’s opinions were kind of … well… irrelevant.”

“I know, right?” Darcy shrugs, tries to imagine the most outlandish scenario she can, and puts words to the craziest thing that comes to mind. “OK, so let’s say it was something beyond just your own theories and personal experiments, like… like the _New York Post_ claiming that it was your fault the portal opened over Stark Tower and that the Chitauri invaded Manhattan, that Loki was nothing more than some underrated British actor you’d hired to play the villain in your own personal ego-stroking scenario, and that–”

“ _What?_ ”Jane looks aghast. 

“I mean. Uh.” Darcy mentally reviews what just came tumbling out of her mouth and tries to clarify. “You know how the tabloids are, how they like to print sensationalistic things, like _Genius Scientist Proven a Fraud, Faked Results, Authorities to Press Charges_ , and then people are all ‘Oh, I read it in the papers, I saw it on Fox, it must be true!’ and then public opinion turns just like—” she snaps her fingers “—like that.”

“But that, that’s obviously disprovable! There’s, there’s _Thor_ , and Tony Stark is Iron Man, and there’s SHIELD, how could _anyone_ think it was some supervillain plot I’d cooked up? And if it’s that implausible, why would I possibly want to throw myself off a building?”

Darcy winces, resting her thumb on her cheek and her middle and index fingers on her brow, and lifts her other hand in a wordless _who even knows?_ gesture. “I have no idea. That’s the problem.”

“Darcy,” Jane starts, then pauses, looking mildly concerned. “What is all this even about?”

Darcy sighs, rolls her eyes, manages a tiny laugh at herself. “Sherlock Holmes. I guess he’s kind of been on my mind, for reasons I can’t even really explain properly, ever since what happened last—”

“Wait a second.” Jane raises a finger. “Back up. Who’s Sherlock Holmes?”

Darcy blinks, then facepalms. Sometimes she forgets just how culturally clueless Jane can be. “Never mind,” she mumbles through her hands.

 

**iv.**

In the end, she does call up John Watson. Not, Darcy would be quick to argue, because she has any real interest in pursuing this crazy Sherlock-is-alive theory, because that way lies madness and incoherent forum posts and really really bad fanfic. No, she calls John Watson because she remembers his smile and his blue eyes and the way his hand had felt against her forehead. 

And also because, let’s face it, Thor and Jane can be _really loud_ and _enthusiastic_ when Thor is in town and not out saving the world, and he’s been in town more than a little bit recently, and Darcy hasn’t been on a good date in months and she has needs too, alright?

So she calls John Watson.

On the first date, John takes Darcy out for drinks and then they spend an hour or more wandering the streets of Covent Garden. Darcy’s managed to get into that awesome stage of inebriation where her whole body feels warm and semiliquid but she’s still more or less coherent, and it turns out John Watson is just as much fun to spend time with as she had hoped. He’s got a mental map of London that more than rivals her own, not to mention a quiet, confident _presence_ that makes her feel completely secure, and before they part ways later than evening she’s discovered that John Watson is both a gentleman and a fantastic kisser who leaves her breathless.

On the second date, John takes her out to one of the best Italian restaurants she's ever been to – and given that she grew up in Queens, that's saying quite a bit. There’s delectable chicken marsala and an _amazing_ bottle of Pinot Noir, and Darcy probably spends far too much of the meal eyeing him contemplatively, and by the time dinner’s over she would be seriously considering inviting John upstairs to her flat if she wasn’t trying very hard to stick to an ironclad three-date rule.

On the third date, Darcy nearly gets shot in the face.

 

**v.**

It turns out, Darcy would be willing to argue later, that kidnappers have the worst timing _ever._

She prepared for this date. She prepared _extensively._ She’s shaved her legs, she’s had her hair done up in a style that lets it fall just past her shoulders, she’s wearing low heels (because John’s only an inch or two taller than she is), and she has on her warm Irish wool longcoat and a low-cut cornflower blue sheath dress that she knows full well goes with her eyes and makes her boobs look _fantastic._ She’s even got condoms in her purse just in case of undeniable sexual impulses that strike before she can get him back to her flat or, y’know, indoors somewhere private. They’re wedged right between her wallet and her taser, in fact, the latter of which Darcy left in there more by habit than anything else, because come on, she’s on a date with John – what could possibly go wrong?

Really, she should know by now not to ask questions like that. Even nonverbally. Because fate positively _loves_ to fuck with her expectations.

So, third date.

After dinner, after several glasses of an incredibly tasty Gewurtztraminer and conversation peppered with more sexual tension than she’s felt in a really long time, they’re strolling arm in arm down a boulevard near High Street Kensington and Darcy thinks, _screw waiting and public indecency, I want this_ now, and pulls John into a narrow darkened cul-de-sac and up against the cool brick wall. John runs fingers through her hair, cups the back of her head, and starts driving her mad with little nibbling kisses up the length of her jaw and down the line of her neck, and she lets the front of her coat fall open and sees his eyes darken in reaction. His hands begin to wander into even more interesting places, and she hooks a hand behind his neck and one heel around his leg and pulls him closer, shutting her eyes and letting out a soft moan, and John’s lips have just passed her collarbone and look like they might be well on their way to joining his hands in territory further south—

—when she hears a pair of metallic clicks awfully close by.

“Pardon me,” comments an unfamiliar voice.

Darcy’s eyes fly open and she tenses against John. There are two men in balaclava masks standing in the mouth of the alley, pistols pointed in their direction, and beyond them a cargo van with an open side door and blacked-out windows blocks the view of the street.

“I so hate to interrupt this particular tête-à- tête, but I’m afraid I need both of you in the van. Now.”

The two men hustle them efficiently into the van, handcuffing their hands behind them, and put them on their knees in the middle of the floor. Before a third man puts black bags over their heads, Darcy sees the back of a fourth man in the driver’s seat, and the second guy purposefully starting to frisk John while staying clear of the first’s line of fire. Then the bag blocks her sight, and she squawks in surprise as impersonal hands quickly pat her down.

“Hey! _Hey! Hands,_ buddy! Does it really look like I’m hiding a weapon somewhere in this dress?”

The immediate response is a cold gun muzzle poked hard against the back of her head and a chilly, indifferent reply. She recognizes the first man’s voice, the one that ordered them into the van: “Quiet, you. Do what we say and you might get out of this in one piece.”

She swears, flinches away from the gun. “Who the _hell_ do you guys think you—”

“Darcy,” John’s voice says, softly, intently. “Not now.”

It’s harder than she would have thought to bite her lip and stay silent. Darcy knows she has a tendency to talk (some might unkindly say _babble_ ) when she’s nervous or on edge, so shutting up right now? Not her first impulse. Instead, she sits there, unable to see much of anything, knees aching from the hard floor of the van and feeling the burn of anger and helplessness curl through her with every sway and turn and change in velocity. It’s only the sensation of John’s shoulder pressed up against hers that keeps her from completely freaking out.

After the monotony for the first two or three minutes – _nobody’s_ talking, though Darcy would bet no-one else is having as hard a time of it as she is – her thoughts stop chasing each other in circles and start heading for that calm almost-zen place that she usually hits only after spectacular sex, in the midst of a good drunk, or – apparently, huh, who knew? – in the middle of life-threatening danger. To try and stay there, she breathes through her nose and makes a mental list of what she knows.

The bad: hey, _kidnappers._ With pistols. And Jane has only the slightest idea where Darcy is or when she’s due back, assuming that she isn’t presently distracted by science. Also: Thor’s not in town until tomorrow, most likely, which means he won’t be flying in to rescue her, but on the other hand he and Jane aren’t distracting each other right now either, so really that one could be filed under either good or bad, but probably bad, because lack of Thor is generally bad.

The good: John Watson. Who can keep his head under pressure and, let’s face it, knows his way around unpleasant people with firearms and can usually handle them too. Of course, said handling is probably dependent on the whole _not being handcuffed_ thing, so it’s good-with-serious-shortfalls at the present time. 

Also: her. Darcy’s been through more than a little bit of interesting times in her own right; she knows when she can help and when she should run, and even though right now her heart and her feet are telling her _run, run, run_ she might actually be able to do something more than be Damsel in Distress, if she can just think up how. Of course, as with John, there’s the _being handcuffed_ thing, which is, she’ll admit, more than a little distracting.

However:

She’d never confess it casually, but OK, yeah, Darcy’s been in handcuffs before. There was that occasion at Culver U. where she got caught in the computer labs way after hours, though in her defense the whole thing was overblown by the authorities at the time. It wasn’t like she was trying to steal equipment or anything; it was a (mostly) harmless prank on a stuffed shirt of a misogynistic professor who really needed to be taken down a notch. And yes, if pressed while really drunk she might reluctantly admit there _was_ that time when she ended up handcuffed to a headboard _in flagrante delicto,_ but all things being equal she would much rather prefer that whole incident never gets _known_ , let alone mentioned, by anyone else. The point is, though, that Darcy knows she’s got kind of thick wrists and reasonably small hands, and with a bit of unobserved effort and a little lost skin she’s fairly certain she can wriggle out of handcuffs.

The key word there is “unobserved”, which right now she’s anything but.

The van twists a path through London’s streets for the better part of twenty or thirty minutes. By the time they finally pull to a halt Darcy hasn’t got the slightest clue where they are, and the kidnappers seem intent on not letting them know. The bag stays on Darcy’s head as she’s pulled out of the van, and only what sounds like John being pulled along with her keeps her from trying to break free and scream her head off. Probably that’s for the best; if these guys have any brains at all – and the way they took her and John suggests they just might – they won’t have been taken anywhere screaming’s going to make the least bit of difference.

And isn’t _that_ a cheerful thought. She tries to put it out of her head.

Darcy can’t see, so she tries to listen.

Nobody’s talking yet, which gives her no idea how many of them came in; however, she can’t hear the sound of the van’s engine any more and heard more than one set of car doors open and close, which implies all four of the kidnappers got out of the van. One for her, one for John; she thinks she heard one of them walk ahead to get whatever doors might be closed, and—

“You. Stay here and keep an eye out.”

—that’s talker’s voice, so three in, one out, right? Unless there are more men inside, in which case she and John are totally screwed and—

—no. _Quiet. Listen. Think._

Her heels clack noisily on the floor: _concrete._ The sound is both immediate and delayed: _echoes._ Big room. Abandoned. Industrial? The man leading her along stops, turns her, and she feels a straight horizontal piece of wood high up against the back of her calves and realizes _chair_ just before he pushes her down onto it. The man twists her arms over the back of the chair so that her cuffed hands would make it awkward as hell to get up fast, then takes a few steps to one side. Close by, where she thinks the guy went, there’s a quiet thump as something that sounds like fabric gets dropped: _my purse?_

Somewhere nearby she hears a grunt and a thump and a soft scrape of wood as John presumably gets the same treatment. Then there’s a whisper of fabric, and footsteps approaching.

The bag comes off her head.

She looks around quick, sees: she was right in almost every particular. John’s on another chair about fifteen feet away, facing towards her, his hair a mess and a grim expression on his face. The floor is concrete, dirty, and the room they’re being held in more like a long, broad hall than anything else. There’s only a few fluorescent bars lit up near the roof, making her think her guess that this place is abandoned industrial was probably right, too. There are _one, two, three_ men in sight: one standing by John, the other two – one of whom is the talker, she thinks – by her. The talker’s the one who probably just pulled the bag off her. The fourth one she remembers from the car must still be outside. But more importantly: they’re all still wearing the balaclavas. Which meant they didn’t want to be recognized, she thinks, that they didn’t want their faces to be seen or recognizable. Which meant -- _God, I really hope I’m right about this_ \-- that there might be an actual chance she and John could get out of this without serious injury.

And her purse is maybe three paces to her left, dropped casually on top of a heavy-looking desk amidst dust and scattered rat turds.

“What do you want?” John says crisply. “Neither of us is rich, I’m sorry to say, so if it’s ransom you’re after I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

The talker – Darcy recognizes the line of his shoulders now, even though all these guys are dressed more or less the same – slowly walks in an arc around John. “Nothing like that, Dr. Watson. Doctor John Watson – is it all right if I call you John?”

John’s jaw clenches. “If you must. And you are?”

The man chuckles politely. “All that we need from you is information, John.”

John huffs with incredulity. “And you couldn’t have just _asked?_ ”

“Suffice to say I doubted you would answer truthfully without a little… leverage.” The man flickers a dangerous-looking smile – gleam of teeth there and gone again in a second – as he replies. “Three questions. Give me three honest answers, as complete and truthful as you can manage, and you and your lady friend walk free without any further complications.”

“How the hell can you possibly know if I—”

“—if you answer honestly?” the man interrupts. “Really, John, given how we’ve become acquainted I would have thought you would respect my intelligence and my professionalism more than that. I have more than a little information already. All that I need is for you to confirm my investigations.”

John glares up at the man, narrowing his eyes. “And if I don’t, you’ll … do what, exactly?”

“John.” The man sounds almost contrite. “Must we sully this reasonable conversation with threats and unkind words?” Another smile ghosts across the man’s mouth, in the brief pregnant silence that follows. “If you don’t give me satisfactory answers, I won’t hurt you.”

Johns face scrunches up in disbelief. “What the bloody hell are you—”

“I’ll have my men hurt _her,_ ” the man comments, waving a hand casually back towards Darcy.

 _Oh fuck,_ Darcy thinks numbly, and starts trying to get her fingers to remember exactly how she slipped out of those handcuffs before.

“You do that, you bastard, and I’ll—”

“John, please,” the man cuts him off, quietly. “I don’t want to, believe me. All you need to do is tell me what I want to know, and none of that will be necessary.”

John bites back more words with evident difficulty, taking a few deep breaths as he slowly, visibly, tamps down his anger. “…fine. Ask your questions.”

“Thank you, John. I knew you’d be reasonable.” The man smiles again, that predatory, sharklike smile. “First question: what happened to Giuseppe Gorgiano?”

John narrows his eyes, looks thoughtful for a handful of heartbeats. Then: “Gorgiano. That monstrously large Italian? The criminal?”

“The very one.”

“Dead, as far as I know. I never met the man myself, you understand, only knew about him by his nasty reputation and saw the body after.”

The kidnapper’s silence is eloquent as he gestures _and then?_

John looks up, nods with certainty. “Stabbed to death, as I recall. Knife in the throat. It was tangential to Sherlock’s investigation at the time, if I recall, and the police never made an arrest.”

“But you know who the killer was.”

“Is that a question?” John asks hopefully.

The man’s silence speaks volumes.

“All right, yes, Sherlock deduced who had killed Gorgiano. It was a man called Gennaro Lucca. Lucca was on the run, and he killed Gorgiano because the man was pursuing him and his family.”

“Thank you, John.” The man circles around behind John again, a contemplative expression in his eyes – or at least, that’s what Darcy thinks. “Second question, then: what happened to Gennaro Lucca and his wife Emilia after that, and where are they now?”

John shrugs as best he can, in handcuffs and awkwardly balanced against a chair. “As far as I know the police put them into witness protection after they investigated the circumstances of Gorgiano’s death. Something to do with the Red Circle, some group that Gorgiano was involved with, and money laundering. The last time I saw Lucca was more than six months ago, I’m afraid, at New Scotland Yard. It was…” John thinks a second. “Late May, I think? The 25th, maybe. Aside from that, I don’t have the slightest idea where he might be now. That’s the whole point of witness protection, isn’t it?”

“That’s fine, John, well done.” She sees the gleam of the man’s teeth again, as he crosses behind John once more. “Last question, then?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Where is Sherlock Holmes now?”

John jerks in the chair, twisting around to stare at the man. “ _What_ did you say?”

“It’s not that difficult a question, John. Where is Sherlock Holmes now?”

“Are you playing with me? What is this, some sort of sick sodding joke?”

Darcy winces. Being confrontational _might_ not be the best way to deal with potentially violent kidnappers, but honestly? She can totally understand where John’s coming from at the moment. She wriggles her hands cautiously, twisting, feeling the cuffs dig into the skin of her thumbs. _Not … too much… further…_

“John, I really must insist on an answer.”

John’s glare could set things on fire. “You want an answer, you kidnapping bastard? He’s _dead._ Sherlock’s dead. He jumped off the top of Saint Bart’s and I saw him fall.” John’s expression twists, remembered grief warring with anger. “I saw him – I saw him laid out on the pavement – ”

Eyes downcast, concentrating, she hears the talker say something else but she’s really not paying attention to him anymore, and then one of the other kidnappers is looming up in front of her and her cheek explodes with pain. She sags sideways, head ringing with the blow, feels the side of the chair digging painfully into the hollow of her elbow, and dimly she’s aware of John shouting and the talker pushing him back down with a raised pistol. The man in front of her takes hold of her shoulders and straightens her up again, and somewhere she lost her glasses. What she can see of his face looks almost apologetic, muttering “Sorry, miss,” but none of that matters now because she just got the steel band of the handcuffs over the knuckle of her left thumb and her left hand is _free_.

She looks up at the guy, tasting blood, and makes her lips twist into a sly smile. “Really, pal? Because I’m not,” she tells him, and then brings her foot up in a hard, fast kick between his legs. He croaks, clutching at himself, and she curls her fingers into claws and swings sideways for his eyes with the still-cuffed hand.

The man jerks back, faster than she would’ve expected, and her nails don’t connect, and she has a split second to think _missed, damnit, shit shit shit—_

—before the steel cuff catches his brow and sends him stumbling backwards, on his heels and off-balance.

Darcy doesn’t wait to see what he or anybody else does next, just bolts to her left, going for her purse and the taser she really hopes is still tucked inside. She grabs the purse and begins to duck down towards the shelter of the desk it was on, seeing a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, the talker spinning around, and then there’s a sharp _crack!_ and sharper pain and something slashes into the side of her face. 

She yelps with the shock, flinching hard away from the sudden pain, and her duck turns into more of an uncontrolled tumble but at least she’s got the bulk of the desk between her and the bad guys now. She hits the floor harder than expected, whacking her elbow painfully on the concrete, and that and the blood that’s dripping on the ground from whatever tore into her face scares the hell out of her. _Ignore the pain, ignore it, just get the purse open and oh please oh please oh please—_ her fingers close around her taser’s familiar plastic grip _—yes!_

There’s shouting and wood scraping on concrete and what sounds like a brawl on the other side of the desk and a stream of nonstop profanity from the guy she tagged in the face, and she can just barely see a tangle of legs and bodies all scrummed together as she peers underneath it. The third kidnapper who’d been standing by John is coming around the backside of the desk with a pistol in his hand, but— _thank you, whoever it is that watches out for fools and lovers, because we’re sure as hell both_ —he’s distracted, half-looking at whatever else is happening, and Darcy yanks out the taser fast as she can and nails him center mass. The guy drops, twitching, and she dumps the discharged cartridge with unsteady hands. _Why oh why didn’t I buy one of those nice, lovely,_ multishot _tasers?_ She hasn’t got the time to dig another cartridge out of the depths of her purse, and—

—well, she’s never needed to use direct-contact-stun mode before, but, hey, tonight looks like it’s having more than its fair share of firsts, right? Darcy tries making her way up to her hands and knees, but her left arm’s not working quite right and in fact, fucking _ow_ , is really starting to hurt quite a bit, but she needs to know what’s going on. 

There’s an incoherent bellow and then a _thump_ like a linebacker hitting a practice dummy, and she startles as the entire desk hops sideways like a spooked cat. She manages to get to her feet, and sees the talker down on the ground, pistol gone who knows where, and apologetic-kidnapper-guy – yeah, she has _no_ regrets about clocking him upside the head anymore -- grappling with John against the desk. John is doing what he can to fight the guy off, but unlike her he’s still got his hands cuffed behind him and holy _crap_ , how did he manage to down the talker handcuffed like that and _it doesn’t matter, Darcy, focus, come on, focus!_

“Hey, asshole!” she shouts.

The kidnapper turns. 

And that’s when she hits him with the stungun.

John stares at her, open-mouthed, and she stares back, gasping, holding her aching arm against her ribs. He’s got a split lip and a sullenly bleeding gash up on his left cheek and the beginnings of what looks like a truly spectacular shiner, but Darcy thinks maybe she’s never been so happy to see someone in her life. He glances down at the taser still in her hand, then raises an eyebrow.

“You know those are illegal for civilians in the UK, yeah?” he deadpans.

She snorts, then tries to muffle hysterical laughter, because although she’s pretty sure identical grins are stealing onto both their faces they’re still fuck knows where with a conscious kidnapper somewhere outside. “No jury in the world would convict me.”

 

**vi.**

What comes after that is more than a little intimidation and less than a lot of bluffing, not to mention more going through pockets looking for handcuff keys than she’d prefer, particularly given the whole left-arm-not-working-properly thing, but the long and short of it is:

They make their escape.

They leave the fourth guy cuffed to a handrail outside, under a sky that’s beginning to look a lot like rain – yeah, ask her if she gives a damn right now – and drive until they see something that looks familiar. Luckily, that doesn’t take as long as Darcy had feared, because truth is that the one arm’s starting to hurt like a motherfucker and she’s got John’s handkerchief pressed up against the bloodied side of her face with the other and she’s feeling dizzy and kind of chilled and John keeps trying to _talk_ to her and he’s saying something about staying awake and –

 

**vii.**

– she wakes up slowly.

Bed. Clean. White sheets. Familiar ceiling.

Her room, in her flat?

A quiet snuffle draws her attention, and she looks over to her right to see John’s head pillowed on the sheets by the edge of her bed.

_Um. OK. Wow. What?_

She tentatively reaches over, half-wondering if this is a dream, the other half still drowsily incoherent, and threads her fingers through his hair.

_Huh. Sure feels real._ She feels her lips tug into a tired smile, and that hurts her face, and then she remembers what happened and – 

Her sharp inhalation wakes John. He pushes himself upright in the chair parked beside the bed, glaring around sharply, at least until she reaches for his hands. God, his wrists are badly abraded, ugly with bruising. Her wrist, as well. Her _arm_ \-- she looks down, sees the white plaster of a cast encasing her left bicep and forearm, feels the dull pain still throbbing through it.

“Fractured, I’m afraid,” John says matter-of-factly, and she looks back at him. He must see something worrying in her expression because he hurries to add: “But nothing to worry about, overall. The trauma surgeon was much more concerned about the laceration on the side of your head.”

She reaches up slowly with her right hand, touches the gauze and surgical tape. “Bad?”

“No,” John assures her, with a tired smile. “Not as bad as it could’ve been. Not as bad as I thought it was, to be honest. I was afraid he’d shot you. Turns out he clipped the desk instead, but that threw off a spray of wood shrapnel and that was what—” He stops, gathers himself visibly.

“You. OK?” she manages. Her throat is preposterously dry.

“Me?” His cheek’s been stitched and that shiner does, indeed, look pretty spectacular in the light of day, and of course there’s the wrist-abrasions, but John just shrugs dismissively. “My nurse friend, Mary, saw to me before you were even out of X-rays. It’s nothing, really.”

“Liar,” she snorts, then feels immediately mortified. “I mean—um—”

John grins. “Don’t worry. The painkillers can make a person more than a little babbly, I’m told. You said some absolutely fascinating things on the drive from hospital to here, by the way.”

Oh _God_. She wants to burrow back under her sheets and make the whole last twelve or however many hours just _go away—_

“Also, your flatmate’s boyfriend is _unconscionably_ large,” John goes on. “Almost big enough to make a fellow like me develop an inferiority complex, in fact.”

He’s met Thor. John’s _met Thor._ And Jane, of course, but also _Thor_. She pictures the two of them side by side: John, barely an inch or two taller than she is, and Thor being, well, _Thor_ , and shakes, barely able to muffle her laughter.

“Fellow seemed quite impressed at what we’d done, honestly. Kept going on about we were mighty warriors to have fought so valiantly, how stories would be told of this day, and…” John finally notices her lack of composure. “Are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

“Water, I think.” She sips from the cup John offers. “It’s just, you know. This is not.” She clears her throat and takes another sip of water. “How I planned for you to first see me in bed.”

Their laughter wakes Jane and Thor.

 

**viii.**

Naturally, things can’t stay that meet-cute forever (for particular values of _meet-cute_ ; Darcy’s pretty sure that most canonical definitions don’t involve kidnapping and tasers and hospital visits). For one thing, the police want to know what the hell happened.

John tells them the truth.

Well, _most_ of the truth.

Only about twelve percent not quite the truth, probably. Kidnapping, cargo van, handcuffs, chairs, questioning, confrontation, escape – the only part he carefully edits out is just where exactly the taser came from. But really, when all’s said and done, their abductors had pistols, so it’s not like them having a taser as well is all that much of a stretch, right?

Right.

The police didn’t find the kidnappers at the interrogation site, anyways. Of course, since a taser’s discharge only puts the average person down for a double handful of minutes (well, and John was too busy keeping the cargo van heading towards the hospital and telling her to stay awake to dial 999 immediately after their daredevil getaway) that isn’t that surprising. What _is_ surprising is hearing (secondhand, via John) that their probable kidnappers had all turned up dead less than a week after the incident in question.

(The police were naturally quite interested in _that_ , as well, but since Darcy had still been in a cast and John’d been smack in the middle of a six-hour overtime surgery during the estimated time of death, their alibis were more or less iron-clad.)

Weeks pass. Bandages are removed. Bruises and abrasions fade. Her cast, in all its gloriously astronomical-cartography-and-Asgardian-rune-knots-graffiti, comes off. Physical therapy _sucks_ , so much. Slowly, her elbow begins to recover something approaching its original flexibility and strength. Through it all, Darcy’s got a regular prescription of Percocet, which _thank God_ because she wouldn’t be able to think straight from the pain otherwise. It’s got some odd side effects, though, leaving her head feeling glassy and sorta off-kilter at the same time, and her thoughts end up making some odd intuitive leaps.

So she’s got plenty of time to think about everything that’s happened. Too much, really, because one-armed lab assistants-slash-interns aren’t quite as useful as ones with two arms, so Darcy ends up not taking as much off Jane’s shoulders as she usually might, and thus: too much time to think. About, for instance, their kidnappers’ motivations. Darcy’s got this odd certainty rummaging around inside her brain that, in fact, the talker didn’t give a damn about the answers to his first two questions at all. They were just, what do you call it, camoflauge.

But if even their abductors thought Sherlock might be alive – for whatever reasons or motivations they might have had – then maybe, just _maybe_ , there might be something to it.

Darcy would like it noted, for the record, that leaving her with too much free time and nothing to do is, generally speaking, a bad idea. Really, that’s what was to blame for her hacking into the New York DMV and making Thor a fake driver’s license after SHIELD raided Jane’s Puente Antiguo lab for Darcy’s iPod and everything.

(Darcy’s particularly proud of that feat, to be honest, since she managed to pull it off _without_ her own laptop or any of the programs of negotiable legality she had on there. OK, sure, SHIELD did spot the fake, but _still._ Darcy Lewis, 1, SHIELD… uh… OK, also 1, but that makes it a draw. A tie. No clear winner. Lone rebel vs large mysterious Orwellian governmental agency, totally a standoff, yup, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it.)

So between the bouts of physical therapy and the not-regularly-working and the regular doses of Percocet and the doctor-mandated _no alcohol whatsoever_ , Darcy needs _something_ to keep her mind occupied. Crafting a stealthy suite of adaptive regex-wielding shell scripts to trawl the Deep Web for whatever disassociated traces of Sherlock Holmes’ post-apparent-suicide activity might be out there, and assemble them into something human-comprehensible? Just what the doctor ordered. (So to speak.)

It takes her a couple of days to build and compile the code and set it to searching, and some of the coding she comes up with is admittedly unorthodox. (Percocet. Seriously. Wow.) It works, though, and the results are… unexpected. There’s nothing like absolutely incontrovertible evidence, true, but what there is forms a reasonably plausible pattern of events and aftermaths that could, conceivably, be linked back to the hypothesis of Sherlock Holmes not being dead after all.

How much of it is supportable via publicly accessible information, and how much of it isn’t, well… that’s another question entirely. But John, from what she sees when she tries surreptitiously raising the possibility, is definitely not interested in discussing it, no matter how subtly or obliquely she tries to bring the topic to the table. Darcy’s stubborn enough that she doesn’t _want_ to just drop it, though; their kidnappers did what they did for a reason, after all.

And like Jane said back before all of this – OK, Darcy will admit, _almost_ all of this, since she did actually meet John before that particular discussion took place – she’s knows she’s right and she’s got some evidence. She just can’t actually, openly _talk_ about any of it with John without things potentially devolving into one of those arguments that she imagines might end in noisy silence and furrowed brows (him) or shouting (her) or crockery being flung at high velocities (neither of them, really, but she’s seen enough old movies with tempestuous romances that she keeps expecting that to happen to her one of these days). Darcy really likes this thing she has going with John and doesn’t want to fuck it up, but gaaaah, _seriously_ , some days she just wants to talk out the notions she’s got locked up in her head, but who isn't going to think she’s crazy if she does?

So.

Things go on like that for a while, with the enigma of Sherlock’s possible survival malingering in the back of her mind like an itch she won’t let herself scratch, until one day when, quite to her surprise, she comes home to the flat and finds an unexpected visitor there.

 

**ix.**

Darcy’s just gotten in the front door and finished locking it behind her when an unfamiliar voice says, “Good afternoon, Miss Lewis. I think it’s time we had a chat.”

She shrieks and jumps about a foot and a half, and her hand’s already reaching into her purse when the voice goes on to say, in posh upper-class tones, “If you try to pull that ubiquitous taser out of your handbag I shall have to see you get a tranquilizer dart for your efforts. And believe me when I say neither of us would particularly enjoy that.”

Darcy freezes, then turns around very carefully. She’s already got her hand on the grip of her taser, but the voice spoke with such calm assurance that she can hardly believe it’s an idle threat. Jane was still wired in to whatever breakthrough she had just made in the lab, spouting technobabble about juxtadimensional horizons and hyper-perception targeting, when Darcy exhaustedly called it a day. Thor is, to the best of Darcy’s knowledge, somewhere in the Indian Ocean on some remote island dealing with some otherworldly threat that has way too many syllables for her to pronounce properly. And John, well, things have kind of been rocky there since the last time she guilefully tried raising the topic of Sherlock’s possibly still being alive.

(Her mother would undoubtedly have something to say about how she never did know when it was best to drop something, she’s sure. Right now, Darcy’s thinking she might’ve been right.)

All of which means she’s more or less on her own, here.

Sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of what looks suspiciously like her emergency stash of Darjeeling (because though Jane is a coffee junkie, let’s not kid ourselves, and Darcy has honed her coffee-brewing skills to a degree professional baristas might envy, she still, occasionally, wants a soothing cup of tea) is a dark-haired, middle-aged man in a bespoke, charcoal-grey three-piece suit. Behind him, there’s another guy in a dark-and-notably-less-custom-tailored suit who’s quite casually holding what does indeed look like a tranquilizer pistol.

She lets go of her taser and slowly, deliberately, extracts her empty hand from her purse. “Sorry. I’m a little jumpy, given what happened the last time some random unfamiliar guys took me by surprise.”

“Oh, I completely understand,” says the suit agreeably. “But tasers and tranquilizer darts have a way of disrupting reasonable conversations, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Funny. The last guy said something along those lines, too.” She slowly edges further into the flat.

A moue of irritation creases the suit’s expression. “Miss Lewis, I’m here because I need you to stop what you no doubt imagine to be your clandestine investigations into the demise of Sherlock Holmes.”

 _Oh, really?_ “Why?”

He blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

“Why do you need me to stop whatever activities you allege I’m pursuing? I mean, if he _is_ actually dead, then no amount of surreptitious digging will bring him back, and my alleged clandestine investigations wouldn’t matter.” Darcy narrows her eyes at him. “On the other hand, if Sherlock Holmes _isn’t_ dead, but certain presumably governmental interests need him to continue to appear as though he is, well…” 

One edge of the suit’s mouth turns up in what might, charitably, be described as a hint of a smile. “I’m sure you can spin whatever fanciful conspiracy theories you like, Miss Lewis. They’ll no doubt fit in quite well with the preponderance of other implausible gossip on various discussion boards. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“Uh huh.” She studies the suit carefully. “And if I don’t? What, you’ll ‘disappear’ me? Because I’ve gotta tell you, the last guys to try that regretted it. I don’t think it’d turn out too well for you, either.”

“Please, Miss Lewis, we needn’t do anything so gauche.” The suit’s tone is such that Darcy’s pretty sure butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “After all, your General Visitor visa is coming up for review soon, isn’t it?”

This time Darcy blinks. “That’s… OK, I’ll admit, that’s an impressive stick. What’s the carrot?”

The suit frowns at her. “Excuse me?”

“Well, deportation’s totally a nice touch, as legal threats go, but the truth is that my, um, alleged investigations have probably already turned up enough evidence that I could conceivably pop the bubble of this hypothetical conspiracy without doing any further digging.” Darcy pauses. “Ostensibly.”

There’s a stony silence.

“Not to mention,” she plows doggedly onwards, “that not just Jane but SHIELD as well might get curious as to the timing of this convenient deportation. So.” She lifts her left hand, palm up, suppressing a wince at the ache in her elbow. “Stick.” She lifts the other hand, hovering it beside the first. “Carrot?”

“I’m beginning to comprehend why Doctor Watson finds you so fascinating,” says the suit, apropos of absolutely nothing, and stands.

“Yup. Wait. What?” She gazes up at him. He’s surprisingly tall, on his feet.

“My reasons for wanting you discontinue your investigations shall, for the time being, remain just that: mine. Suffice to say that, so long as you refrain from making any public declamations concerning the demise of Sherlock Holmes, your visa will remain unmolested and you may continue your researches alongside Doctor Foster. However,” he adds, “I will admit to being somewhat impressed by the scope and efficacy of your, hmmm, ‘alleged’ investigations.”

“Um. Thank you?”

“I may wish to call upon your investigative services at some point.” He pauses meaningfully as he and his associate make their way towards the front door. “For suitable remuneration, to be sure.”

“I. Uh. OK?” Darcy eyes him uncertainly.

“Thank you for the tea, and your time.”

“Don’t mention it,” she manages weakly.

“Have a pleasant afternoon, Miss Lewis. I’m sure we’ll speak again in the not-too-distant future.”

And just like that, the suit and his escort leave.

Darcy stares incredulously at the door for a long moment, then pulls out her smartphone and impulsively texts Jane. _I think we need a better security system for the flat. Maybe the lab, too. And new locks, potentially. DL_

 _why, did something happen? r u ok?_ comes the reply, a few long minutes later.

Darcy sits in a chair by the kitchen table, drumming her fingers against the wood surface, and tries to focus her thoughts. Whatever the hell that just was, it wasn’t a win. On the other hand, it wasn’t a _loss_ , either. More like a standoff with potential for future mutually beneficial gain.

Her phone vibrates on the tabletop. _darcy? u ok?_

As mildly disquieting meetings went, in fact, that one had been, comparatively speaking, astoundingly cordial. Especially when set beside the one immediately preceding it. The truth was, whatever other questions might’ve been sitting in the back of her head during the past couple of weeks, fine-tuning that bundle of interconnected search scripts _had_ been an enjoyable distraction from physical therapy and the usual routine of fetching coffee and playing gofer-slash-chauffeur to Jane.

_darce, ur silence is not reassess ring me here_

_reassuring me damnit autocorrect_

And OK, yeah, so she isn’t _entirely_ comfortable with the thought of getting conscripted by some mysterious (and presumably completely different non-SHIELD) government agency. But maybe that’s for the best, right? Go into these things with eyes open. If she decides something’s worth helping on, she helps; if not, she doesn’t. That’s what Sherlock Holmes did, after all, didn’t he? Darcy Lewis is no man’s (or enigmatic government agency’s) thoughtless tool, right?

Right.

_darcy if you don’t answer right now i swear i’m calling the police and then coming over there with my death ray_

Darcy rolls her eyes and then types out a quick response. _Relax, I’m fine. DL_

Trust Jane to take things to _that_ level. The scary bit is that Darcy’s not even sure whether or not Jane is joking about the death ray. Darcy starts typing out a lengthier and more explanatory response: _Just had an interesting, in the Chinese curse sense, visit from a bespoke MiB re: Sherlock Holmes & some inquiries I’ve been making post-abduction. DL_

She almost hits [ _SEND_ ]—and then freezes, with her finger hovering over the button.

Mysterious, possibly Orwellian government agency.

She backspaces over most of what she just typed in, thinks for a moment, then begins to put together an almost completely different message.

_Just had a mild panic attack over what turned out to be nothing. Jumping at shadows. Talk over dinner when you’re finished with being a big sciency brain, k? DL_

She sends her reply and settles back into the chair, spent. It’s been a long day to begin with, and matching wits with someone who might or might not have come straight from the shadowy side of Vauxhall Cross is _not_ her first choice for “relaxing leisure activity”. The empty teacup and saucer are still on the tabletop, and if Darcy was Sherlock Holmes she’d be all over powdering those suckers for fingerprints to puzzle out the identity of her potential future employer, but the truth is she’d really rather just toss them in the sink and wash them up with dishes from takeaway with Jane later tonight.

There were enough mysteries in the world already.

Some could be left for tomorrow.


End file.
